Unrequited
by AstroGirl
Summary: I was challenged to write a story about 'Rygel's unrequited love for Crais.' Being the perverse soul I am, I couldn't just write humor, but had to try for something serious and believable. Takes place during and after 'The Choice.'


**Unrequited**  
**by AstroGirl**

A strange, unfamiliar emotion surges through Rygel when he realizes Crais has done a deal with Xhalax. Oddly, it isn't anger, though he pretends it is. You have to show people they can't get away with this sort of betrayal, after all. And there's a volatile Banik to placate, lest he do something ill-advised to both of them. But the true feeling in his heart is more akin to... What? Admiration? Appreciation? Whatever it is, it surprises him with its strength, until it's all he can do to keep a smile from his face. _You clever probakto_, he thinks. _That's just what_ I _would have done!_

Crais apparently never notices.

* * *

After it's all over, he finds Crais in a bar on Valldon, drinking from a bottle without a label. He parks his hoverthrone next to the Sebacean, who either doesn't notice him or is pretending he doesn't. Rygel briefly considers ordering a drink, but a swift evaluation of the establishment's hygiene (or lack thereof) decides him against it. Rygel has eaten worms plucked from plundered graves and food cubes hidden for cycles in a Leviathan's amnexus ducts, but even he has standards.

He doesn't look over at Crais, instead watching their fractured reflections in the shattered remains of the mirror behind the bar. "If you would like to talk..." he says eventually.

Crais takes a swig from his bottle. "No."

"Hmm." He pauses just long enough to let Crais think he might be about to give up on the conversation and leave. "If you ask me, you did the right thing. Both times."

Crais laughs darkly. "Tell _her_ that."

"Tell who? Aeryn?" Rygel makes a dismissive gesture. "Bah. What does she know?" He turns and looks at Crais at last. The man looks terrible. Greasy strands of hair fall like limp vilska-worms across his face, and his eyes are red, as if he's just been through a torture session or a crying jag.

"Yes." Crais takes another drink. "Aeryn." His words are twisted with bitterness and slurred with the effects of alcohol, but Rygel catches a different tone behind them, a certain nuance to his face.

"Oh," he says. "It's like that, is it?"

"What are you talking about?"

"Let me guess... You offered her, hmm, _comfort_. In her grief. And she turned you down, yes?" Crais drinks again, his face impassive. "Or, worse, she _didn't_ turn you down... but made it quite clear you were nothing to her, anyway. Am I getting warmer?"

Crais flings the bottle against the barroom wall. It shatters into glittering pieces, clear liquid splashing out like some pale creature's blood. No one looks up.

"I'll take that as a yes."

"Go away." Crais gestures to the barman, who sets an identical bottle in front of him without comment. Crais opens it with a quivering hand and spills its contents messily into his mouth.

Rygel watches him and shakes his head.

"She's right," Crais says at last, his voice a battered rasp. "I'm not... I'm useless. No good to myself, to anyone. I should have died instead of him."

Instead of Crichton, Rygel wonders, or Tauvo? Not that it matters. "Yes, that's right, go on. Wallow. A woman doesn't want you, so of course it's 'Oh, I'm useless. Oh, poor me. I should be dead.'"

"Thank you for those words of reassurance," says Crais.

"You're as bad as Crichton, getting yourself all in knots over that female. Of _course_ she doesn't understand you." He leans in towards Crais. "Men like us aren't often understood. And Aeryn..." He waves a hand. "She's a soldier. Competent enough, but there's no deviousness in her. No _cunning_. She understands how to kill, but she has no conception of true survival instincts. Not like you and I. There's a reason, you know, why you were a captain and she was only a grunt."

"That isn't it at all."

"No, of course it isn't. You're sitting here getting dren-faced in an establishment I wouldn't use as a lavatory because you enjoy the fine libation. Forget her, Crais. She's a useful ally, but she's hardly a fit companion. There's an entire galaxy of others out there."

'No." Crais's voice shakes like the bottle in his hand. "There aren't."

Rygel snorts. "Don't be fahrbot, of _course_ there are." Crais's other hand is braced against the bar. Rygel rests one of his own on top of it. "Yotz, if you were Hynerian... and female...and less _hairy_..."

Crais snatches his hand away, and Rygel is surprised by a small stab of pain, just over his heart.

"Go away," Crais says, and this time he means it.

Rygel goes.

* * *

He dreams that night of a female, Hynerian Crais. She kisses him, her inexplicably still-present goatee tickling his face. She tastes of cheap alcohol and Hynerian pheromones.

He wakes in a bed that is sticky with what he tells himself is last night's spilled jelza-sauce and tries not to think.

* * *

Monens later, when they tell him Crais is dead, he takes the news in silence. The others mourn, publicly and with feeling, for Talyn, but if any of them grieves for Crais -- and he thinks perhaps Aeryn does, despite it all -- they do so in private. As does he.

Deep in the ship's night, he lifts a glass of something never sold in a seedy bar on Valldon, and he says the Hynerian Prayer of Passing.

And, all alone, he drinks.


End file.
